Benefiting from Language Similarity in the Multilingual MT Training: Case Study of Indonesian and Malaysian

Abstract: The development of machine translation (MT) has been successful in breaking the language barrier of the world’s top 10-20 languages. However, for the rest of it, delivering an acceptable translation quality is still a challenge due to the limited resource. To tackle this problem, most studies focus on augmenting data while overlooking the fact that we can borrow high-quality natural data from the closely-related language. In this work, we propose an MT model training strategy by increasing the language directions as a means of augmentation in a multilingual setting. Our experiment result using Indonesian and Malaysian on the state-of-the-art MT model showcases the effectiveness and robustness of our method.